The journalist, Joakim Medin, has really messed up: dyed his hair, bearded beard and false identity, even worn a hidden microphone. So equipped he has entered the subculture of Swedish sex tourists:
- Cheers are guys!
- But the waffle, one for Swedish bastard! How long have you been in Thailand then?
And then it's up and running. Cheerful study objects are hard to imagine.
The thing with the microphone is not so stupid - and I understand that Medin in the foreword is careful to describe the method: he has recorded all the conversations he reproduces. Otherwise, it would be easy to get swept and rough when the goal is to portray something that resembles a caricature but is not.
This is a report on something that is already known - sex tourism to Thailand's prostitution industry - but which still has a strong revealing quality.
About ten pages into the book, the reporter makes an observation that summarizes the project - in its simplicity, in its shocking straightforwardness. He is at a strip club / brothel with his newly found Swedish friends. Group stage shows are underway: young, Thai women caress, lick, play they are overpowered by lust. The audience: staring men from other countries.
Medin thinks that the men regard the women as the animals at a zoo. But, he continues, "I instead get the feeling that I am visiting a zoo where I watch horny men from all over the world."
There is no beautiful image of men: staggering, sweaty men, drunk with beer and their unrestricted power as buyers, men licking and hugging young women for a fee, with the booth poking through the holiday shorts. The lack of shame is striking inside the sex tourists' bubble.
Joakim Medin is adept at telling about what he himself has been about, less effective in the analysis parties and interviews with experts who certainly contain both facts and the whole but lack resistance and energy.
A common trait he finds with the sex tourists is a strong political sympathy for the Swedish Democrats: they feel that the motherland is on the ropes, weighed down by feminism, multiculturalism and Muslim immigration. The social-conservative / right-wing nationalist project in general seeks a kind of restoration for the nation, which is also a restoration for man and traditional - so-called "natural" hierarchies. The strong political core of the world view of sex tourists is exciting and highly relevant to highlight.
On the other hand, I think Medin is wrong when he devotes a few pages to SD's party leader Jimmie Åkesson celebrating Christmas 2018 at a Swedish-owned pub in the resort of Phuket. It may seem like it means something in the context, but it doesn't.
It is also a little tiring that he cannot refrain from distancing himself from his study objects in the text. Most often he proclaims that their views are grotesque, in a kind of side-replies to the reader. Unfortunately, it gives the book a small flavor of PK: ism that it really shouldn't have needed.
But the book is extremely readable nonetheless.
Joakim Medin's book, which builds on a noted report he published last year, is reportage in its basic form. The stock, which is considerable, lies in the meetings with the men. The open and happy sex tourists from Sweden. The men who traveled from feminism and demanding women in Sweden to a vivid porno fantasy in the sun, where women are available for five hundred kronor. The men who, in all their serenity, still know, somewhere within themselves, that fantasy life is lived at a price. Behind the red-tanned tanned faces, souls glimpse in rot.
The insight that buying sex more than anything is about power - and the opportunity to exploit it - deepens during reading.